I spent a full week of my life, in 2018, cutting a case study film for a campaign that ran in three markets for six weeks. The film had a drone shot. It had a rising synth. It had a chyron claiming a 340 percent lift in a metric we had started measuring the month the campaign launched.
It won something. The campaign was dead by the next fiscal year.
Cannes Lions wraps up tomorrow and my feed has been a rose-colored blur since Monday. Trophies, panel selfies, several pieces of genuinely excellent work getting the recognition they earned. I am not against any of this. I have wanted a Lion. I have stayed up until four in the morning helping other people get one.
Here's the part that gets lost. A jury on the Croisette is evaluating a two-minute film about your work. Your CFO is evaluating your work.
Awards measure how well a campaign can be narrated, and narration is a separate craft from the one that moves a business.
Three things follow from that, and none of them are cynical. They are structural.
One, the entry is written afterward by people who already know the ending. Every messy quarter becomes a deliberate phase. Every accident becomes an insight. I have written those sentences. They were true the way a good wedding toast is true.
Two, the categories reward the new. A brand platform in year four, still compounding, still recognizable at fifty feet, has nothing fresh to submit. Patagonia does not need a Lion for the thing it has been saying since before most of the jury started working.
Three, winning work has to be legible in ninety seconds. Distribution discipline is not legible. Pricing architecture is not legible. The decision to hold one voice for six straight years, which is most of why Duolingo can do anything it wants now, does not cut into a sizzle reel.
So enter. Genuinely. Awards win pitches, pitches make payroll, and young creatives deserve a reason to stay in a hard industry. Just keep two documents. One is the reel. The other is the boring spreadsheet where you wrote down, in January, what winning would look like in your actual market with your actual margins.
Awards measure how well a campaign can be narrated, and narration is a separate craft from the one that moves a business.
Twice a month I sing karaoke at a bar in Southeast Portland where the floor grabs at your shoes and the host calls everyone baby. Nobody has ever handed me a trophy for 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.' The room still knows, every single time, whether I meant it. That is a scoreboard too. It just doesn't come with a case study film.